Creative gastronomy in your hostel

Gastronomic events?

The consumers’ attention has to be captured by the development of experiences. When you’re planning something special on the gastronomic level, make sure your guests actively participate in the setting you have staged for them. They can be employed to create a sense of community among your guests. Very well suited for lobby-events!

Meals are in essence sequential: breakfast, lunch, dinner and in-between, which provides a natural setting for the framing of a gastronomic event.

Make surprise gastronomic experiences a key- service for your hostel but make it feel like a random and kind event.

Ask guests to provide local recipes for food and drink and invite them into the kitchen.

Why not take it a step furter? Invite guests to cook for other guests. Include a budget and give them a chance to invite other people to their dinner.

Invite local producers into your hotel.

Buy from them for the hostel kitchen and stock.

Have them come over for tastings with guests.

Transform your hostel to a social being-space!

In hostels, guests often use a communal kitchen. Eating with eachother is usually a random act- depending on who is near at that time. Guests are both producers and consumers of the experience. Backpackers are used to the creative and open atmosphere in hostels, aswell as the cheap fees. However, there is a distinct danger that they will primarily see your hostel as being a cool place to stay, but not to participate in! Participation in the creation of experience.

there is a distinct danger that they will primarily see your hostel as being a cool place to stay, but not to participate in

Do your guests cook for themselves in a communal kitchen?

Reaching the guest with big and rich, full-on experiences, engaging all the senses, is getting somewhat out of fashion. That is to say: we still make them, but tourists increasingly want more “real” and local experiences, lived through the locality and negotiating spaces. Staging such allround and full-on experiences, still apply within settings such as winetasting or a guided visit to the local brewery. You could compare it to the loss of producer generated flow in television. The audience can no longer be captivated on their terms, for the duration of the program (due to commercial breaks), but the viewer can experience a fuller and broader event, within a wider spatial setting. Food is good for tourism experiences as it is often a short detour or entrance to local culture. It brings locals and tourists together.in a shared cultural experience.

Anyone interested in placemaking and the more anthropological side of tourism will know that food bonds us with place, identity and culture. A very important role to play, considering the growth of the ‘network society’.

Misconception: Gastronomic events are not for small hostels and they are a bit elitist.

Definitely untrue. This perception of elitist and toffeenosed events. is largely due to the producers of consumer- and tourist-experiences- FOR the consumer -who aimed at the more discerning connaisseur. Nowadays, eating and drinking is very much a broadly accepted and enacted activity. Not in the last place because of new collaboration methods and modes of co-producing experiences. On the consumption side of things, the ‘foodies’ don’t really go for the haute cuisine anymore. Nevertheless, one has to remember that food and gastronomy is highly bound by culture, which automatically creates a sense of both inclusion and exclusion.
Democratising both food and travel has led to a huge amount of food travel websites. Still, they do look or more rare and foreign foods, prefably not easily accessable by the large public, therewith establishing and maintaining there foodie lifestyle plus being able to spread it among other groups.

Our Community Kickstart program is an in-depth workshop-format that truly prepares your community for success in food and drink tourism.

Definitioner

staging (Grouping (Gestalt))

Gestalt Principles of Grouping

The German word “Gestalt” roughly translates to “whole” or “form,” and the Gestalt psychologist’s sincerely believed that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. In order to interpret what we receive through our senses, they theorized that we attempt to organize this information into certain groups. This allows us to interpret the information completely without unneeded repetition. For example, when you see one dot, you perceive it as such, but when you see five dots together, you group them together by saying a “row of dots.” Without this tendency to group our perceptions, that same row would be seen as “dot, dot, dot, dot, dot,” taking both longer to process and reducing our perceptive ability. The Gestalt principles of grouping include four types: similarity, proximity, continuity, and closure.Similarity refers to our tendency to group things together based upon how similar to each other they are. In the first figure above, we tend to see two rows of red dots and two rows of black dots. The dots are grouped according to similar color. In the next figure, we tend to perceive three columns of two lines each rather than six different lines. The lines are grouped together because of how close they are to each other, or their proximity to one another. Continuity refers to our tendency to see patterns and therefore perceive things as belonging together if they form some type of continuous pattern. In the third figure, although merely a series of dots, it begins to look like an “X” as we perceive the upper left side as continuing all the way to the lower right and the lower left all the way to the upper right. Closure finally, in the fourth figure, we demonstrate closure, or our tendency to complete familiar objects that have gaps in them. Even at first glance, we perceive a circle and a square.Source

perception (Grouping (Gestalt))

Gestalt Principles of Grouping

The German word “Gestalt” roughly translates to “whole” or “form,” and the Gestalt psychologist’s sincerely believed that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. In order to interpret what we receive through our senses, they theorized that we attempt to organize this information into certain groups. This allows us to interpret the information completely without unneeded repetition. For example, when you see one dot, you perceive it as such, but when you see five dots together, you group them together by saying a “row of dots.” Without this tendency to group our perceptions, that same row would be seen as “dot, dot, dot, dot, dot,” taking both longer to process and reducing our perceptive ability. The Gestalt principles of grouping include four types: similarity, proximity, continuity, and closure.Similarity refers to our tendency to group things together based upon how similar to each other they are. In the first figure above, we tend to see two rows of red dots and two rows of black dots. The dots are grouped according to similar color. In the next figure, we tend to perceive three columns of two lines each rather than six different lines. The lines are grouped together because of how close they are to each other, or their proximity to one another. Continuity refers to our tendency to see patterns and therefore perceive things as belonging together if they form some type of continuous pattern. In the third figure, although merely a series of dots, it begins to look like an “X” as we perceive the upper left side as continuing all the way to the lower right and the lower left all the way to the upper right. Closure finally, in the fourth figure, we demonstrate closure, or our tendency to complete familiar objects that have gaps in them. Even at first glance, we perceive a circle and a square.Source

The importance of staging a tourism experience

Backlund, Jonas; 2014 All rights reserved
http://theseus32-kk.lib.helsinki.fi/bitstream/handle/10024/84698/thesis2014.pdf?sequence=1
http://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:amk-2014121019249
The aim of this study was to show the importance of staging an experience in the tourism industry. Furthermore, it examined what a beverage experience is and what needs to be taken into consideration when one of these experiences is created

The importance of staging a tourism experience

Backlund, Jonas; 2014 All rights reserved
http://theseus32-kk.lib.helsinki.fi/bitstream/handle/10024/84698/thesis2014.pdf?sequence=1
http://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:amk-2014121019249
The aim of this study was to show the importance of staging an experience in the tourism industry. Furthermore, it examined what a beverage experience is and what needs to be taken into consideration when one of these experiences is created

The importance of staging a tourism experience

Backlund, Jonas; 2014 All rights reserved
http://theseus32-kk.lib.helsinki.fi/bitstream/handle/10024/84698/thesis2014.pdf?sequence=1
http://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:amk-2014121019249
The aim of this study was to show the importance of staging an experience in the tourism industry. Furthermore, it examined what a beverage experience is and what needs to be taken into consideration when one of these experiences is created

Apophenia and Imagination as Cognitive Process

MATTEO MESCHIARIhttp://www.continuitas.org/texts/meschiari_roots.pdfKeywords: hunter-gatherers - cognitive processes - apophenia - hunting - Landscape Mind Theory (LMT)This article discusses and develops the Landscape Mind Theory (LMT) that the author previously formulated. Using numerous ethnographic examples and recent research in neuroscience, he explores the role of landscape and the ecosystem in the shaping of cog- nitive processes in Homo sapiens sapiens. The analysis focuses in particular on hunter- gatherer cultures, and shows how hunting phenomenology on the one hand and intellectual and symbolic activity related to the environment on the other are connected through evolutionary and cultural factors. A particular emphasis is placed on the imag- inative and linguistic productions of hunter-gatherers.

Cities are more than just a collection of buildings. The built environment is also shaped through the daily lives, actions and ideas of the people who use it. Designing physical places to enhance the quality of life of people in order to generate happiness, a sense of belonging and identification is the art of placemaking.

The scenario where two people who don’t know each other start talking due to an external event. The catalyst could be a street artist or physical obect like a sculpture. Or it could be an unusual condition such as hail in summer, power failure, fire in a neighboring building or anything else that spurs people who do not know each other to start talking.
Triangulation is a critical factor for a successful public space. It includes the practices and activities of the public realm that create a linkage between people. Or what Whyte would call “that process by which some external stimulus provides a linkage between people and prompts strangers to talk to other strangers as if they knew each other”
(William H. Whyte)

Flow

The mental state of operation in which a person in an activity is fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and success in the process of the activity.
Proposed by Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, the positive psychology concept has been widely referenced across a variety of fields.
According to Csíkszentmihályi, flow is completely focused motivation. It is a single-minded immersion and represents perhaps the ultimate in harnessing the emotions in the service of performing and learning. In flow, the emotions are not just contained and channeled, but positive, energized, and aligned with the task at hand. To be caught in the ennui of depression or the agitation of anxiety is to be barred from flow. The hallmark of flow is a feeling of spontaneous joy, even rapture, while performing a task although flow is also described as a deep focus on nothing but the activity – not even oneself or one's emotions.

Event

Evenement. An occurrence at a given place and time; a special set of circumstances; a noteworthy occurrence. (Getz 2007:18)

(Events are )special times and spaces in which specific rituals or practices can be developed and maintained. These practices are designed to meet particular objectives (such as building social cohesion or stimulating economic impact or image change) related to individual events or to the places and communities in which they take place. (Greg Richards)

Events can (...) become a means of changing social structures and creating new realities.